{"id":"b-XdOpERC1Q","title":"The Path to Institutional Scale","description":"What must be in place for institutions to scale AI-driven commerce responsibly.\n\nNEAR is the unified commerce layer for assets and agents. \n\nWebsite: https://near.org/\nNEAR AI: https://near.ai/\nIntents: https://near.org/intents\nChain Abstraction: https://www.proximity.dev/\nSharding: https://nearone.org/\n\nFor the devs\nGitHub: https://github.com/near \nDev Docs: https://docs.near.org/\nDevhub: https://devhub.near.page/ @NEARDevHub\n\nConnect with socials\nTwitter:   / nearprotocol  \nBlog: https://near.org/blog/\nMedium:   / nearprotocol  \n#NEAR #nearprotocol #NEARAI","channel_name":"NEAR Protocol","published_at":"2026-03-02T00:00:00.000Z","thumbnail_url":"https://img.youtube.com/vi/b-XdOpERC1Q/hqdefault.jpg","transcript_text":"Hello everybody. Uh, welcome Diego Hunter. I've spent the past four years sitting on panels talking about when will institutional flow meaningfully and it seems to be the same conversation over and over again. But today I think we've got two incredible people that can give us the answers of what is really the pathway to institutional scale to bomoths of industry. Diego Hunter, please would you uh give us a quick introduction? Sure. Hello everyone. It is so nice to be with you all. Near has an incredible community and and this is an amazing venue. Um I'm Hunter Horsley. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Bitwise. We manage about $15 billion. We work with banks, uh, hedge funds, institutions, wealth managers, uh, to help them understand and participate in the opportunities in crypto. Yeah. As for me, uh, hi everyone. A couple of roles that are worthy of mention. I'm a general partner at Han Ventures, which is a crypto firm. I am the co-founder and executive chairman of Anchorage Digital, the first federally charted bank. I am an investor in Bitwise, and most importantly, I'm the chairman of uh, the Near Foundation. Amazing. So two big supporters of NRA as well and real pleasure to have you on stage today. So thank you for joining. Now we were talking upstairs earlier saying people are saying why hasn't institutional flow arrived but it has arrived but why doesn't it feel like it? Yeah. So that that that is the question. I think what people are feeling is definitely we are getting everything we wanted. We have black rockck buying unis swap. We have Apollo, you know, becoming a curator and launching things on um on morpho and somehow that is not acrewing to your wallet into the tokens in terms of value and is very possible that there is all institution adoption institutions come into crypto and actually take over crypto and there's no value cruel to the substrate. That is what people are feeling. So the question is absolutely not when are institutions coming. I think the assumption that people had is when institutions come we win and institutions are here and we're not winning. So that is actually the thing to unpack. Yeah. Um I I I totally agree with that. I I I think a a basic thing is that uh so Bitwise was approved on four trillion dollar plus wealth management platforms in the last 6 months in the US. And every time they approve access to a crypto product, I say, \"Can I tweet about this? and they say, \"No, you may not.\" Um, and so I I think another element of this moment is that there's a ton of energy. It's all happening right now. The largest corporations, institutions in the world are all in on crypto. Do gave some examples, but the majority of them are not on Twitter. They're not in our Telegram groups, and they're not talking about it very loudly. So I think for a lot of us people in the room who have been following the developments over the last few years the information is not flowing um openly. So I think that that's one dynamic. The second dynamic I think of the moment is um the institutions the new audiences that are coming into the space. Bitwise took in $3 billion of uh net inflows last year. We've taken in over half a billion so far this year. They're buying assets. They're putting it in portfolios. But it's a $2 trillion asset class, which means everyone who has already owned crypto owns much more crypto than the new guard that's coming in and wants to own it. So if your friends in the Telegram group are uh feeling depressed and selling tokens, they own way more tokens in 2026 uh than the institutions do. Over time that will change and shift but um the the sort of long-standing ownership base still controls the majority of the assets, owns the majority of the assets. So they have a very large role in setting the price and right now um they're not uh they're not feeling the most uh bullish for a variety of reasons. So I think that those two dynamics are subtleties that are at play which is there's absolutely everything is going right right now. As Diego said, we're getting everything we wanted, but um it's happening very quietly. So, it's very hard to see. And then secondly, um uh the investors who've owned who own most of crypto are not feeling very bullish and some, you know, some of them are selling and that moves price, right? So, what's the long-term game plan? What are you seeing your clients looking for? Is it mostly ETFs or are they buying hard tokens? Uh well, you know, so so Bitwise has four parts of the business. We have ETFs in the US. We have ETPs in Europe. We have a near staking ETP in Europe. We have alpha solutions where we um generate yield on assets through option strategies. And then we have onchain solutions which is staking. We stake several billion. Today the Ethereum Foundation announced that uh they're using our software to stake and uh and we create vaults. I I think uh so that's the aperture I can comment on. Um I think a lot of the incoming investor set is going to use uh ETFs first. Um, and then the um, those that go the deepest are going to wind up owning spot um, and interacting on chain. Um, it's going to take a minute to play through all of that. I think what does the future look like? I think the future looks like um, at at risk of of kind of too abstract of a comment here, I think the future looks like uh, e-commerce. like you know uh in the 2000s you had conventional retailers like Sears or Barnes & Noble or Circuit City or Best Buy or Walmart or uh Target and you had the e-commerce companies which are a very different set and fast forward to today some of the legacy players have died uh some of them have really adapted and Walmart is as much an e-commerce company as uh as Etsy um and and then of course you have a whole new host of players I think that's what's going to happen here, which is in in 5 years time, um, the person at Morgan Stanley who leads digital assets is going to know as much or more than a person who works in crypto, so to speak. Uh, I think ownership will uh be blended u much more into the institutional set. And as Dio referenced, I think uh Black Rockck and Apollo will be doing as much onchain as as a crypto startup. So, I think that this is incredible because what this represents is the aspiration that public blockchains will get adopted, that crypto will become a mainstream asset class and set of assets. Uh that that's underway and will will happen. Uh and we're in a moment of transition now. And I think something else to point to is the fact that crypto is not a monolith. 15 years ago, crypto was just Bitcoin. And even 10 years ago, you know, the set of things that we called crypto was pretty constraint. But right now, crypto is so many things. And so the reality is that there's an unbundling of what crypto is. Stable coins are absolutely crypto. There are onchainsued representations of fiat and that does not acrue value to your tokens. And so you don't feel the token appreciation. But if you're holding equity in a company that is doing stable coins, you're extremely happy as an investor right now. So crypto is evolving and it's splitting up and splintering off. And the same investors that are looking at crypto in stable coins are very different than the ones that are looking at the store of value narrative in Bitcoin that are very different than the ones that were playing in the infrastructure game of scaling that now are actually burnt on that and are actually no longer deploying. And so we have to separate the conversations in 2026 in a way that we didn't have to separate the qu the the conversation in 2016 or even 2020 because it was much more more of a monolith. That's why it's hard to talk about this because institutions are absolutely rabid about crypto right now. They are. It's just not your tokens and the tokens themselves. And to that specific point on the tokens, if we narrow the conversation about value acrruel, we are in a little bit of a regime change where crypto was 100% narrative for the history of crypto where the only thing you needed was some nice painted narrative of the future for value to acrue. We are changing and doing a regime transition where the actual business and value accel of the token and the actual underlying business matters so much more that you can't not expect the institutions to look at that first. And so institutions that are coming in are looking at that first. What is the business model? How you're actually generating revenue and how that actually acrus to the actual protocol and to the value of the system. And we can no longer be head wavy about it. And this is the new reality. And so if we are expecting um we're going to art back to the world where narrative is 100% of the business that is never going to happen. Maybe narrative comes back to be 50%, maybe it comes back to be 20%, but it will never come back to be 100%. So if that's the only thing that your protocol is relying on, I think that has been a phase transition and you should get that out of your out of your head. Build a business first and then add token economics to it versus the opposite route which we've done so far. And what are you seeing kind of word on the street? Do does it feel like we're still in infrastructure stage? Does it feel like we are in scale up stage or are we starting to transition into utility? We're really people are thinking about balance sheet diversification and payments rails and maybe I'll start by saying that we have all of the infrastructure that we need for the next three centuries. Uh so we have it all. That is not true around the edges. You know there's a lot of stuff that hasn't been built for RWAs. We keep talking about RWAS, but RWAs in its essence, one of the biggest places where they're going to come from are obviously equities and those are securities. And the true unlock outside of regulation is basically the infrastructure that meets the current regulation in a way that we can actually play with it in our own backyard in DeFi, right? That is not done. That is being built. But it's not the true infrastructure as in moving bits around. These are ERC20, ERC 720, ERC, whatever. These are just protocols. We have the actual technical engineering infrastructure to do it. What we don't have is the full end toend infrastructure to do it. And that's just a different problem alto together. You don't need more scaling uh you don't need uh different APIs. You you need to get through the morass that is to link these things together with the 150 200 countries all over the world for this to actually work with their regimes too. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I agree with everything Jo said. Um, I think we're supposed to disagree. Just take the other side. Um, uh, I This is why DO is an idiot. Yeah, it's it's hard. Diego was backstage saying he's never lost a debate. So, yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Never want to take the other side of Diego. That's my main message uh to all of you. I I I I think that we're we're entering the application stage. So I think um the incredible thing is there are people who now want to build things and do things for their own balance sheets for their own businesses uh for their own customers and they're saying how can I do this thing I want to do which is an application um and that's unbelievably exciting. I also want to say we're we're here at Nearcon. Holy smokes hats off uh to the Near uh community and hats off to the Near team. Uh I think Near has executed unbelievably well to be positioned in this moment. Uh the numbers on intense are extraordinary. The insight to uh address the fee switch is brilliant. Ironclaw is I think preient. Um Ilia has been thinking about um confidential execution and TEES for a long time. I think that's brilliant. I think there's a ton of desire to apply um uh and build for use cases right now that uh those are the perfect capabilities for. And then the other thing that I think Near does really well which is key to this moment is um if we're talking about applications, think about the prototypical technology company. They have distribution organizations. They have sales teams. They have four deployed engineers. they have humans who are articulate and can help somebody who wants to build something interact with the capability set or the software. Uh and I think Near has done a really phenomenal job also on that front, Alex and and his team in uh helping people um see the path from their idea uh to how they can implement it and integrate uh intents or or other things. So I think that mix of capabilities is really important now because I do think we're absolutely in the exciting stage which is um applications. I know it's it's the stage that I'm excited about the most right now because years Diego's favorite of us building infrastructure actually now starts to be coming into something of real value and utility. And it was great reading the Bitwise report around the trillion dollar opportunity that's coming up for Aentic Commerce. And I'd love to hear your views of whether you think we are in a position near or any other company to really join together the two worlds of AI and crypto. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, uh I mean I think it's not lost on anyone in this room that AI is an unstoppable freight train. Um, and I actually think we've all gotten very lucky in a sense. Um, because it's going to disrupt so many industries, so many places that your friends work, the companies that they're at, um, uh, are going to have their fates uh, disrupted a bit. And I think if there's one space that will be, uh, an unmitigated benefactor of the adoption proliferation of AI, it will be public blockchains and crypto assets. Uh I think that it's going to move very fast not because of crypto but because of AI. AI is accomplishing a quarter worth of roadmap every two weeks right now. So my my forecast on it moving fast is is just an empirical view of how rapidly uh applications and uh developments are coming out of AI. We've already seen the first few instances of agents intersecting uh with crypto, maybe two or three at this point. I think absolutely near is on the right side of this. I think as the public is grappling with AI more, um the awareness for things like confidentiality and privacy is growing. Uh, I think agents obviously you're not going to want to uh authorize uh open claw with uh your credit card or an ability to initiate wires and uh not just delete all your emails accidentally, but send uh Dogo all of your uh all of your money accidentally. Um you're going to want to fund them uh with stable coins. They're going to want to transact confidentially through near intense. Um and uh so I think that that this is going to arrive much faster. If you're running a linear regression on progress over the last 6 years, I think the output would be the wrong output. I think you have to dump the last 6 years uh of of data and cut it fresh uh from the last 6 months. And I think what you'll see is things are going to move very quickly. And the fortunate news I think for near is that Near is sort of already in position. Um so uh so I think uh I You know, Jo has said that that on the AI AI topic there's a little bit of like okay in theory but show me but I think the show me is going to arrive in less than 6 months maybe even less than four months. I mean again a AI is moving at a different pace than crypto at a different pace than everything else and that pace is a is a weekly is a weekly pace. So it's uh it's really hard to take the other side of an argument where you know you can always say it's an exponential and so yoga is going to be wrong in two weeks or two months but I will try. I think agentic commerce is absolutely a place where we're letting the narrative run away from us again. Um, primarily everything that is happening in terms of agent commerce can actually put in this bucket of agents doing commerce in the name of a human and for that candidly traditional credentials like Visa credentials or Mastercard credentials actually work extremely well and in fact they are preferable for the human because the human wants the ability to have a chargeback. The human wants to generate points. The human wants to actually have everything aggregated in their wallet and in the system that they already audit on a natural basis. So I think this whole narrative of aentic commerce is ex ass assuming that there's a world where not humans are using agents to buy things for which I think we're perfectly ready for that today. We don't need many new things but a world in which agents are paying each other and there's you know some Tesla car that is paying for electricity automatically and there's peer-to-peer movements and for that stable coins that actually have instant settlement that actually have no reversability become important. But I'm sorry I see zero of that right now. There's nothing happening. there's nothing that is actually credible. So maybe with exponential takeoff in two months I will be extremely wrong and all the cars will be out on the road paying each other. But I highly highly highly doubt it. So here is where I think we're allowing ourselves to just be too excited about the narrative. Does not mean that we're not directionally correct. I think we are. It just means that I think we're putting our priorities in the wrong place and we should be building things for what's happening right now versus necessarily just positioning ourselves ahead. This said, let me just take a step back and actually address AI in general. In that particular instance, I think we're in full agreement. AI creates digital abundance in crypto enforces digital scarcity. These are actually complimentary technologies. And I think one of the things that is happening is as AI is just driving forward and making things much much harder from the perspective of obviously authenticity, identity, etc. We have for the past 15 years actually built the right tools to stop this freight train from actually screwing society at large. And of course the pain has to become big enough and high enough and for for us to actually then I had solutions for this. And right now we're kind of like in this uh in this game of like when do we actually have the zero knowledge and the actual onchain transparency and the indelible ledger actually be and the tool set that actually gets used to solve the problems that are being created. But I very much fundamentally believe that we have together as a community near and crypto in general built the tools that can actually then be used to stop the freight train of AI going in the wrong direction. In the case of Near, one of our primary focuses is of course an agentic cloud that actually is confidential. U it's extremely uncomfortable and I'm sure you all feel this to give Claude and to give Chad GPD and Gemini literally everything that is in my brain. It is feels extremely wrong for this company to literally know what's ahead, what's coming. And it's very different than searching on Google. You're having debates, you're having discussions, you're giving them way more information, and it's just extremely uncomfortable. And I think we should treat AI as an extension of our brain and should have the same legal protections as things in your brain have. In the United States, you cannot be compelled to give a password. You cannot be compelled to give a PIN because that's something that is inside of your brain. you should not be able to be compelled to give out all of your eye metadata and all of your eye transcripts. So, I think that should actually be one of the fundamental human rights and crypto helps this. Very well said. Yeah, I've I've been I've been speaking a lot with my friends back at home who are very much more in enterprise institutional kind of worlds and they can't by by rule in their companies use any kind of AI tooling. What do you think really needs to be true for the agentic commerce world that we're talking about for agentic workflows to really become a common place aside from having Black Rockck getting into the Telegram groups and and really talking about it a bit more? The the question is what what needs to be true for Agentic Commerce or Aentic Workflows to uh to really hit scale. Yeah. Because I mean certainly we're still in a stage right now where we're in a bit of a bubble. M we speak with people who are right on the bleeding edge of technology and everyone I've been speaking to here has been using Claudebot or um or or some form of of AI to support them in their day-to-day in the regular world that adoption is really really low. Yeah. Yeah. So um I think if you if you I'll I'll bring an analogy. Um, the way new technology platforms develop is first you get a capability. So Steve Jobs announces the iPhone. There's a piece of hardware. It has a multi-touch screen. It has a GPS. It is a camera. It is an accelerometer. Then you open it up to developers. So they announce the app store and they announce WWDC. Oh, they have WWDC. And then developers and that can be inside of corporations or independent uh developers need to imagine applications and try their hand at doing it. And um and people need some examples to fuel their imaginations. So I think uh I think a lot of the capabilities are now there and I think that a lot of developers now have their hands on the capabilities and um are thinking and now I think they just need some inspiration and imagination. I I saw something last week where somebody had implemented open claw uh to trade poly markets five minute Bitcoin price prediction market and they had uh come out with a profitable P&L. Uh I think 200,000 people saw that tweet. I saw that tweet too. I'm now thinking about it. I'm now telling you all about it. And there's probably uh 10 people now hacking in that direction, which is um using OpenClaw to act as a as a trading bot um or trading automation. So I I I think that there just need to start to be some examples and that that's why things like WWDC exist, right? Is to highlight examples that can fuel uh imagination and best practices. That sounds a little fuzzy and soft, but we we've we've talked in this in this conversation about the fact we're we're moving past the infrastructure stage towards the application stage and application requires uh a little bit of the subjective stuff which is what's what's a what's an idea that uh is worth uh is worth building. Um and uh so I I think uh I think that's what it'll take is some some uh some prominent uh productive use cases being tried um being effective and then being shared so that people um can be inspired by uh those examples. I don't know I'll um I'll I'll one way that I think about this kind of interesting. So there is a chance that the agentic payment commerce looks exactly like the current payment commerce. I don't think forever but for the foreseeable future. And I think the logic to it that I think is the strongest argument. So the steelman argument is okay we are building intelligence and it's general intelligence and it's essentially superhuman. You are telling me that a superhuman intelligence cannot use the current payment rails, the current credit cards, the current instance settlement to pay for things and to figure it out on their own. I mean, by definition, if they're smarter than me and I can do it, they can do it, too. And so now you're actually discussing whether the rails are actually fit for purpose. And are you telling me that something that is smarter than me in all ways, shape, and forms, understands legal, understands engineering, understands the payment infrastructure of all the countries in the world is not going to come up with a way of like covering for it without actually building it? Maybe they themselves will actually build the SDKs on their own and they'll actually figure out how to actually communicate with one another. So why would we build it? No, let them build it. They're the ones that are smarter than us. So actually this is a really good steal and argument that nobody has been able to decompose for me and say no, no, no, you're wrong because of A, B, and C. It's all kind of fuzzy of like you can't fight both arguments. You can't tell me that AGI is coming and agents are going to be super smart and pay on their own and have all these capabilities and thus need payment systems and tell me that they're not going to be smart enough to figure out the current payment systems themselves. So now we're in this conundrum of like this is this is what I'm calling kind of like a little bit of a you know you show me you tell me why I'm wrong. I think the burn of evidence is on the people that said that agent comedy is necessary cuz I feel like it is not. Yeah. Amazing. So 30 seconds each. The bare case the bull case for why institutions will never reach or will reach scale with agentic commerce. Will you say the last part of that question again? institutions will reach or will not reach scale with aentic commerce. So bare case for Diego, bullcase for you. Hell yeah, I got the bullcase. Uh I think that the I I I don't know how you all feel, but uh I've been in crypto for eight years, been in tech for longer than that. I feel like in some ways we make this all too complicated. uh and uh sort of imagine that we've never seen things like this before. We've never seen something like crypto before. We've never seen something like AI before. I don't know like you know in in the 80s uh there were just mainframes and then someone said you want a a mainframe in your home. It's your main frame. Pretty powerfully revolutionary. Then the internet you can connect to all of the information of the world. You can instantly communicate with anyone in the world. pretty so uh I I think uh I think absolutely institutions are going to the analogy I gave earlier is e-commerce some will ignore it they'll get deprecated some will step into it um and they'll be benefactors and then there will be a new guard um who are built from scratch on the new set of capabilities uh I think it's absolutely inevitable I would not bet against technology freight trains um I think there's not really a credible case um for why this uh new computing platform will somehow stumble and not get adopted uh unlike mobile and cloud and the internet and personal computers. Um I think everyone in this room is is doing the right thing which is now is a great time to be building executing paying close attention you know um and uh and I think there's opportunities are going to abound. I think it will take shapes that are surprising. It always does. Um but uh maybe the very last thing I'd say is institutions are absolutely paying attention. I mean the the way that you see the revenue numbers from the AI labs is because institutions are giving them revenue. Um so I've never seen something be uh focused on at the seuite level so rapidly as AI and budgets are being spent shortcircuiting the normal procurement process. I mean the whole the whole world is focused on it. So, uh, that doesn't mean that everyone's going to going to play through it intelligently. I think there's going to be all sorts of surprises in part, uh, not because it's a new technology. I mean, every other new technology was something we've never seen before, but actually because of the speed of the game. Can you dance at 4x accelerated rate uh, is I think the really new thing about AI. I'll just agree with one thing, which is I think the incumbents of yesterday year like the IBMs are very different than incumbents today. I can tell you right now that Visa Mastercard absolutely got the message when a shitty ass Marxist paper gets published on Twitter and they go down 5% and they lose tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of market cap. They are paying attention and these are extremely competent companies that can actually evolve very different than the incumbents. Stripe is an incumbent now. They're very different in terms of execution than an IBM was as an incumbent. But I think the the bare case that I was presenting is the institutions will come. They are being forced to do it. they're extremely competent, but the value may not acrue to crypto. That is something that is very much out there as a jury is still out of whether our rails are going to be the rails that win. Uh, and if the value ends up acrewing for the underlying, I'm bullish that it it probably will and there's lots of reasons why, but it's not clear that um that that's 100% slam dunk. So our job as builders, as companies, is to make sure we're building for value, keeping it simple, and really not forgetting the things that have happened in the past that work really well to be able to continue that going, but continue to innovate. But fantastic to have both of you here today. Thank you for all the insights, all the contributions, and thank you for your time to listen. Thank you.","transcript_synced_at":"2026-11-03T04:37:25.795Z","segments":[{"start_seconds":9,"text":"Hello everybody. Uh, welcome Diego Hunter. I've spent the past four years sitting on panels talking about when","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=9s"},{"start_seconds":17,"text":"will institutional flow meaningfully and it seems to be the same conversation over and over again. But today I think","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=17s"},{"start_seconds":25,"text":"we've got two incredible people that can give us the answers of what is really the pathway to institutional scale to","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=25s"},{"start_seconds":31,"text":"bomoths of industry. Diego Hunter, please would you uh give us a quick introduction?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=31s"},{"start_seconds":37,"text":"Sure. Hello everyone. It is so nice to be with you all. Near has an incredible community and and this is an amazing venue. Um I'm Hunter Horsley. I'm the","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=37s"},{"start_seconds":46,"text":"CEO and co-founder of Bitwise. We manage about $15 billion. We work with banks, uh, hedge funds, institutions, wealth","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=46s"},{"start_seconds":55,"text":"managers, uh, to help them understand and participate in the opportunities in crypto. Yeah. As for me, uh, hi","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=55s"},{"start_seconds":62,"text":"everyone. A couple of roles that are worthy of mention. I'm a general partner at Han Ventures, which is a crypto firm.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=62s"},{"start_seconds":69,"text":"I am the co-founder and executive chairman of Anchorage Digital, the first federally charted bank. I am an investor in Bitwise, and most importantly, I'm the chairman of uh, the Near Foundation.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=69s"},{"start_seconds":79,"text":"Amazing. So two big supporters of NRA as well and real pleasure to have you on stage today. So thank you for joining.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=79s"},{"start_seconds":85,"text":"Now we were talking upstairs earlier saying people are saying why hasn't institutional flow arrived but it has arrived but why doesn't it feel like it?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=85s"},{"start_seconds":95,"text":"Yeah. So that that that is the question.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=95s"},{"start_seconds":97,"text":"I think what people are feeling is definitely we are getting everything we wanted. We have black rockck buying unis","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=97s"},{"start_seconds":106,"text":"swap. We have Apollo, you know, becoming a curator and launching things on um on","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=106s"},{"start_seconds":113,"text":"morpho and somehow that is not acrewing to your wallet into the tokens in terms of value and is very possible that there","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=113s"},{"start_seconds":122,"text":"is all institution adoption institutions come into crypto and actually take over crypto and there's no value cruel to the substrate. That is what people are","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=122s"},{"start_seconds":131,"text":"feeling. So the question is absolutely not when are institutions coming. I think the assumption that people had is when institutions come we win and institutions are here and we're not","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=131s"},{"start_seconds":139,"text":"winning. So that is actually the thing to unpack. Yeah. Um I I I totally agree with that.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=139s"},{"start_seconds":145,"text":"I I I think a a basic thing is that uh so Bitwise was approved on four trillion dollar plus wealth management","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=145s"},{"start_seconds":153,"text":"platforms in the last 6 months in the US. And every time they approve access to a crypto product, I say, \"Can I tweet about this?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=153s"},{"start_seconds":164,"text":"and they say, \"No, you may not.\" Um, and so I I think another element of this moment is that there's a ton of energy.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=164s"},{"start_seconds":174,"text":"It's all happening right now. The largest corporations, institutions in the world are all in on crypto. Do gave some examples, but the majority of them","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=174s"},{"start_seconds":183,"text":"are not on Twitter. They're not in our Telegram groups, and they're not talking about it very loudly. So I think for a","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=183s"},{"start_seconds":190,"text":"lot of us people in the room who have been following the developments over the last few years the information is not flowing um openly. So I think that","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=190s"},{"start_seconds":199,"text":"that's one dynamic. The second dynamic I think of the moment is um the institutions the new audiences","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=199s"},{"start_seconds":206,"text":"that are coming into the space. Bitwise took in $3 billion of uh net inflows last year. We've taken in over half a billion so far this year. They're buying","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=206s"},{"start_seconds":215,"text":"assets. They're putting it in portfolios. But it's a $2 trillion asset class, which means everyone who has","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=215s"},{"start_seconds":222,"text":"already owned crypto owns much more crypto than the new guard that's coming in and wants to own it. So if your","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=222s"},{"start_seconds":232,"text":"friends in the Telegram group are uh feeling depressed and selling tokens, they own way more tokens in 2026 uh than","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=232s"},{"start_seconds":241,"text":"the institutions do. Over time that will change and shift but um the the sort of long-standing ownership base still","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=241s"},{"start_seconds":249,"text":"controls the majority of the assets, owns the majority of the assets. So they have a very large role in setting the","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=249s"},{"start_seconds":256,"text":"price and right now um they're not uh they're not feeling the most uh bullish for a variety of reasons. So I think","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=256s"},{"start_seconds":262,"text":"that those two dynamics are subtleties that are at play which is there's absolutely everything is going right right now. As Diego said, we're getting","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=262s"},{"start_seconds":271,"text":"everything we wanted, but um it's happening very quietly. So, it's very hard to see. And then secondly, um uh","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=271s"},{"start_seconds":279,"text":"the investors who've owned who own most of crypto are not feeling very bullish and some, you know, some of them are selling and that moves price, right? So, what's the long-term game","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=279s"},{"start_seconds":287,"text":"plan? What are you seeing your clients looking for? Is it mostly ETFs or are they buying hard tokens?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=287s"},{"start_seconds":294,"text":"Uh well, you know, so so Bitwise has four parts of the business. We have ETFs in the US. We have ETPs in Europe. We have a near staking ETP in Europe. We","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=294s"},{"start_seconds":302,"text":"have alpha solutions where we um generate yield on assets through option strategies. And then we have onchain solutions which is staking. We stake","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=302s"},{"start_seconds":310,"text":"several billion. Today the Ethereum Foundation announced that uh they're using our software to stake and uh and we create vaults. I I think uh so that's","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=310s"},{"start_seconds":319,"text":"the aperture I can comment on. Um I think a lot of the incoming investor set is going to use uh ETFs first. Um, and","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=319s"},{"start_seconds":328,"text":"then the um, those that go the deepest are going to wind up owning spot um, and interacting on chain. Um, it's going to","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=328s"},{"start_seconds":337,"text":"take a minute to play through all of that. I think what does the future look like? I think the future looks like um,","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=337s"},{"start_seconds":345,"text":"at at risk of of kind of too abstract of a comment here, I think the future looks like uh, e-commerce. like you know uh in","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=345s"},{"start_seconds":354,"text":"the 2000s you had conventional retailers like Sears or Barnes & Noble or Circuit City or Best Buy or Walmart or uh Target","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=354s"},{"start_seconds":362,"text":"and you had the e-commerce companies which are a very different set and fast forward to today some of the legacy players have died uh some of them have","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=362s"},{"start_seconds":371,"text":"really adapted and Walmart is as much an e-commerce company as uh as Etsy um and and then of course you have a whole new","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=371s"},{"start_seconds":379,"text":"host of players I think that's what's going to happen here, which is in in 5 years time, um, the person at Morgan Stanley who leads digital assets is","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=379s"},{"start_seconds":388,"text":"going to know as much or more than a person who works in crypto, so to speak.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=388s"},{"start_seconds":392,"text":"Uh, I think ownership will uh be blended u much more into the institutional set.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=392s"},{"start_seconds":398,"text":"And as Dio referenced, I think uh Black Rockck and Apollo will be doing as much onchain as as a crypto startup. So, I","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=398s"},{"start_seconds":407,"text":"think that this is incredible because what this represents is the aspiration that public blockchains will get","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=407s"},{"start_seconds":415,"text":"adopted, that crypto will become a mainstream asset class and set of assets. Uh that that's underway and will will happen. Uh and we're in a moment of","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=415s"},{"start_seconds":422,"text":"transition now. And I think something else to point to is the fact that crypto is not a monolith. 15 years ago, crypto was","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=422s"},{"start_seconds":430,"text":"just Bitcoin. And even 10 years ago, you know, the set of things that we called crypto was pretty constraint. But right now, crypto is so many things. And so","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=430s"},{"start_seconds":437,"text":"the reality is that there's an unbundling of what crypto is. Stable coins are absolutely crypto. There are onchainsued representations of fiat and","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=437s"},{"start_seconds":447,"text":"that does not acrue value to your tokens. And so you don't feel the token appreciation. But if you're holding equity in a company that is doing stable","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=447s"},{"start_seconds":454,"text":"coins, you're extremely happy as an investor right now. So crypto is evolving and it's splitting up and splintering off. And the same investors that are looking at crypto in stable","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=454s"},{"start_seconds":463,"text":"coins are very different than the ones that are looking at the store of value narrative in Bitcoin that are very different than the ones that were playing in the infrastructure game of","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=463s"},{"start_seconds":471,"text":"scaling that now are actually burnt on that and are actually no longer deploying. And so we have to separate the conversations in 2026 in a way that","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=471s"},{"start_seconds":478,"text":"we didn't have to separate the qu the the conversation in 2016 or even 2020 because it was much more more of a monolith. That's why it's hard to talk","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=478s"},{"start_seconds":486,"text":"about this because institutions are absolutely rabid about crypto right now.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=486s"},{"start_seconds":491,"text":"They are. It's just not your tokens and the tokens themselves. And to that specific point on the tokens, if we narrow the conversation about value","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=491s"},{"start_seconds":500,"text":"acrruel, we are in a little bit of a regime change where crypto was 100% narrative for the history of crypto where the only thing you needed was some","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=500s"},{"start_seconds":508,"text":"nice painted narrative of the future for value to acrue. We are changing and doing a regime transition where the","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=508s"},{"start_seconds":516,"text":"actual business and value accel of the token and the actual underlying business matters so much more that you can't not expect the institutions to look at that","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=516s"},{"start_seconds":524,"text":"first. And so institutions that are coming in are looking at that first.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=524s"},{"start_seconds":527,"text":"What is the business model? How you're actually generating revenue and how that actually acrus to the actual protocol and to the value of the system. And we can no longer be head wavy about it. And","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=527s"},{"start_seconds":535,"text":"this is the new reality. And so if we are expecting um we're going to art back to the world where narrative is 100% of the business that is never going to","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=535s"},{"start_seconds":544,"text":"happen. Maybe narrative comes back to be 50%, maybe it comes back to be 20%, but it will never come back to be 100%. So if that's the only thing that your protocol is relying on, I think that has","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=544s"},{"start_seconds":553,"text":"been a phase transition and you should get that out of your out of your head.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=553s"},{"start_seconds":556,"text":"Build a business first and then add token economics to it versus the opposite route which we've done so far.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=556s"},{"start_seconds":562,"text":"And what are you seeing kind of word on the street? Do does it feel like we're still in infrastructure stage? Does it feel like we are in scale up stage or","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=562s"},{"start_seconds":570,"text":"are we starting to transition into utility? We're really people are thinking about balance sheet diversification and payments rails and maybe I'll start by saying that we have","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=570s"},{"start_seconds":578,"text":"all of the infrastructure that we need for the next three centuries. Uh so we have it all. That is not true around the edges. You know there's a lot of stuff","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=578s"},{"start_seconds":586,"text":"that hasn't been built for RWAs. We keep talking about RWAS, but RWAs in its essence, one of the biggest places where they're going to come from are obviously","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=586s"},{"start_seconds":594,"text":"equities and those are securities. And the true unlock outside of regulation is basically the infrastructure that meets","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=594s"},{"start_seconds":601,"text":"the current regulation in a way that we can actually play with it in our own backyard in DeFi, right? That is not done. That is being built. But it's not the true infrastructure as in moving","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=601s"},{"start_seconds":610,"text":"bits around. These are ERC20, ERC 720, ERC, whatever. These are just protocols.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=610s"},{"start_seconds":615,"text":"We have the actual technical engineering infrastructure to do it. What we don't have is the full end toend infrastructure to do it. And that's just","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=615s"},{"start_seconds":624,"text":"a different problem alto together. You don't need more scaling uh you don't need uh different APIs. You you need to","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=624s"},{"start_seconds":632,"text":"get through the morass that is to link these things together with the 150 200 countries all over the world for this to actually work with their regimes too.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=632s"},{"start_seconds":641,"text":"Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I agree with everything Jo said. Um, I think we're supposed to disagree. Just take the other side.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=641s"},{"start_seconds":651,"text":"Um, uh, I This is why DO is an idiot.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=651s"},{"start_seconds":654,"text":"Yeah, it's it's hard. Diego was backstage saying he's never lost a debate. So, yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Never want to take the other side of Diego.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=654s"},{"start_seconds":662,"text":"That's my main message uh to all of you.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=662s"},{"start_seconds":665,"text":"I I I I think that we're we're entering the application stage. So I think um the incredible thing is there are people who now want to build things and do things","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=665s"},{"start_seconds":673,"text":"for their own balance sheets for their own businesses uh for their own customers and they're saying how can I do this thing I want to do which is an","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=673s"},{"start_seconds":682,"text":"application um and that's unbelievably exciting. I also want to say we're we're here at Nearcon. Holy smokes hats off uh to the","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=682s"},{"start_seconds":691,"text":"Near uh community and hats off to the Near team. Uh I think Near has executed unbelievably well to be positioned in","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=691s"},{"start_seconds":699,"text":"this moment. Uh the numbers on intense are extraordinary. The insight to uh address the fee switch is brilliant.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=699s"},{"start_seconds":705,"text":"Ironclaw is I think preient. Um Ilia has been thinking about um confidential execution and TEES for a long time. I","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=705s"},{"start_seconds":714,"text":"think that's brilliant. I think there's a ton of desire to apply um uh and build for use cases right now that uh those","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=714s"},{"start_seconds":723,"text":"are the perfect capabilities for. And then the other thing that I think Near does really well which is key to this moment is um if we're talking about","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=723s"},{"start_seconds":731,"text":"applications, think about the prototypical technology company. They have distribution organizations.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=731s"},{"start_seconds":737,"text":"They have sales teams. They have four deployed engineers. they have humans who are articulate and can help somebody who wants to build something interact with","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=737s"},{"start_seconds":745,"text":"the capability set or the software. Uh and I think Near has done a really phenomenal job also on that front, Alex","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=745s"},{"start_seconds":751,"text":"and and his team in uh helping people um see the path from their idea uh to how","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=751s"},{"start_seconds":759,"text":"they can implement it and integrate uh intents or or other things. So I think that mix of capabilities is really important now because I do think we're","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=759s"},{"start_seconds":767,"text":"absolutely in the exciting stage which is um applications.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=767s"},{"start_seconds":773,"text":"I know it's it's the stage that I'm excited about the most right now because years Diego's favorite of us building infrastructure actually now starts to be","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=773s"},{"start_seconds":780,"text":"coming into something of real value and utility. And it was great reading the Bitwise report around the trillion dollar opportunity that's coming up for","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=780s"},{"start_seconds":788,"text":"Aentic Commerce. And I'd love to hear your views of whether you think we are in a position near or any other company","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=788s"},{"start_seconds":796,"text":"to really join together the two worlds of AI and crypto.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=796s"},{"start_seconds":802,"text":"Absolutely. Absolutely. So, uh I mean I think it's not lost on anyone in this room that AI is an unstoppable freight","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=802s"},{"start_seconds":808,"text":"train. Um, and I actually think we've all gotten very lucky in a sense. Um, because it's going to disrupt so many","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=808s"},{"start_seconds":818,"text":"industries, so many places that your friends work, the companies that they're at, um, uh, are going to have their fates uh, disrupted a bit. And I think","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=818s"},{"start_seconds":827,"text":"if there's one space that will be, uh, an unmitigated benefactor of the adoption proliferation of AI, it will be","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=827s"},{"start_seconds":835,"text":"public blockchains and crypto assets. Uh I think that it's going to move very fast not because of crypto but because","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=835s"},{"start_seconds":843,"text":"of AI. AI is accomplishing a quarter worth of roadmap every two weeks right now. So my my forecast on it moving fast","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=843s"},{"start_seconds":850,"text":"is is just an empirical view of how rapidly uh applications and uh","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=850s"},{"start_seconds":858,"text":"developments are coming out of AI. We've already seen the first few instances of agents intersecting uh with crypto,","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=858s"},{"start_seconds":866,"text":"maybe two or three at this point. I think absolutely near is on the right side of this. I think as the public is grappling with AI more, um the awareness","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=866s"},{"start_seconds":875,"text":"for things like confidentiality and privacy is growing. Uh, I think agents obviously you're not going to want to uh","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=875s"},{"start_seconds":882,"text":"authorize uh open claw with uh your credit card or an ability to initiate wires and uh not just delete all your","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=882s"},{"start_seconds":889,"text":"emails accidentally, but send uh Dogo all of your uh all of your money accidentally. Um you're going to want to fund them uh with stable coins. They're","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=889s"},{"start_seconds":898,"text":"going to want to transact confidentially through near intense. Um and uh so I think that that this is going to arrive","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=898s"},{"start_seconds":905,"text":"much faster. If you're running a linear regression on progress over the last 6 years, I think the output would be the wrong output. I think you have to dump","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=905s"},{"start_seconds":913,"text":"the last 6 years uh of of data and cut it fresh uh from the last 6 months. And I think what you'll see is things are","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=913s"},{"start_seconds":921,"text":"going to move very quickly. And the fortunate news I think for near is that Near is sort of already in position. Um","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=921s"},{"start_seconds":928,"text":"so uh so I think uh I You know, Jo has said that that on the AI AI topic there's a little bit of like okay in","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=928s"},{"start_seconds":936,"text":"theory but show me but I think the show me is going to arrive in less than 6 months maybe even less than four months.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=936s"},{"start_seconds":943,"text":"I mean again a AI is moving at a different pace than crypto at a different pace than everything else and that pace is a is a weekly is a weekly","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=943s"},{"start_seconds":952,"text":"pace. So it's uh it's really hard to take the other side of an argument where you know you can always say it's an exponential and so yoga is going to be wrong in two weeks or two months but I","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=952s"},{"start_seconds":960,"text":"will try. I think agentic commerce is absolutely a place where we're letting the narrative run away from us again.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=960s"},{"start_seconds":966,"text":"Um, primarily everything that is happening in terms of agent commerce can actually put in this bucket of agents doing commerce in the name of a human","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=966s"},{"start_seconds":974,"text":"and for that candidly traditional credentials like Visa credentials or Mastercard credentials actually work extremely well and in fact they are preferable for the human because the","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=974s"},{"start_seconds":983,"text":"human wants the ability to have a chargeback. The human wants to generate points. The human wants to actually have everything aggregated in their wallet and in the system that they already","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=983s"},{"start_seconds":990,"text":"audit on a natural basis. So I think this whole narrative of aentic commerce is ex ass assuming that there's a world where not humans are using agents to buy","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=990s"},{"start_seconds":999,"text":"things for which I think we're perfectly ready for that today. We don't need many new things but a world in which agents are paying each other and there's you","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=999s"},{"start_seconds":1006,"text":"know some Tesla car that is paying for electricity automatically and there's peer-to-peer movements and for that stable coins that actually have instant","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1006s"},{"start_seconds":1014,"text":"settlement that actually have no reversability become important. But I'm sorry I see zero of that right now.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1014s"},{"start_seconds":1020,"text":"There's nothing happening. there's nothing that is actually credible. So maybe with exponential takeoff in two months I will be extremely wrong and all the cars will be out on the road paying","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1020s"},{"start_seconds":1028,"text":"each other. But I highly highly highly doubt it. So here is where I think we're allowing ourselves to just be too excited about the narrative. Does not mean that we're not directionally","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1028s"},{"start_seconds":1035,"text":"correct. I think we are. It just means that I think we're putting our priorities in the wrong place and we should be building things for what's happening right now versus necessarily","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1035s"},{"start_seconds":1043,"text":"just positioning ourselves ahead. This said, let me just take a step back and actually address AI in general. In that particular instance, I think we're in","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1043s"},{"start_seconds":1051,"text":"full agreement. AI creates digital abundance in crypto enforces digital scarcity. These are actually","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1051s"},{"start_seconds":1058,"text":"complimentary technologies. And I think one of the things that is happening is as AI is just driving forward and making things much much harder from the","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1058s"},{"start_seconds":1065,"text":"perspective of obviously authenticity, identity, etc. We have for the past 15 years actually built the right tools to","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1065s"},{"start_seconds":1073,"text":"stop this freight train from actually screwing society at large. And of course the pain has to become big enough and high enough and for for us to actually","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1073s"},{"start_seconds":1082,"text":"then I had solutions for this. And right now we're kind of like in this uh in this game of like when do we actually","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1082s"},{"start_seconds":1088,"text":"have the zero knowledge and the actual onchain transparency and the indelible ledger actually be and the tool set that","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1088s"},{"start_seconds":1097,"text":"actually gets used to solve the problems that are being created. But I very much fundamentally believe that we have together as a community near and crypto","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1097s"},{"start_seconds":1104,"text":"in general built the tools that can actually then be used to stop the freight train of AI going in the wrong direction. In the case of Near, one of our primary focuses is of course an","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1104s"},{"start_seconds":1113,"text":"agentic cloud that actually is confidential. U it's extremely uncomfortable and I'm sure you all feel this to give Claude and to give Chad GPD and Gemini literally everything that is","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1113s"},{"start_seconds":1122,"text":"in my brain. It is feels extremely wrong for this company to literally know what's ahead, what's coming. And it's very different than searching on Google.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1122s"},{"start_seconds":1131,"text":"You're having debates, you're having discussions, you're giving them way more information, and it's just extremely uncomfortable. And I think we should treat AI as an extension of our brain","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1131s"},{"start_seconds":1139,"text":"and should have the same legal protections as things in your brain have. In the United States, you cannot be compelled to give a password. You cannot be compelled to give a PIN","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1139s"},{"start_seconds":1146,"text":"because that's something that is inside of your brain. you should not be able to be compelled to give out all of your eye metadata and all of your eye transcripts. So, I think that should","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1146s"},{"start_seconds":1154,"text":"actually be one of the fundamental human rights and crypto helps this. Very well said.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1154s"},{"start_seconds":1159,"text":"Yeah, I've I've been I've been speaking a lot with my friends back at home who are very much more in enterprise institutional kind of worlds and they","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1159s"},{"start_seconds":1166,"text":"can't by by rule in their companies use any kind of AI tooling. What do you think really needs to be true for the","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1166s"},{"start_seconds":1174,"text":"agentic commerce world that we're talking about for agentic workflows to really become a common place aside from having Black Rockck getting into the","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1174s"},{"start_seconds":1181,"text":"Telegram groups and and really talking about it a bit more?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1181s"},{"start_seconds":1186,"text":"The the question is what what needs to be true for Agentic Commerce or Aentic Workflows to uh to really hit scale. Yeah. Because I mean certainly we're still in a stage","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1186s"},{"start_seconds":1194,"text":"right now where we're in a bit of a bubble. M we speak with people who are right on the bleeding edge of technology and everyone I've been speaking to here has","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1194s"},{"start_seconds":1203,"text":"been using Claudebot or um or or some form of of AI to support them in their day-to-day in the regular world that adoption is really really low.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1203s"},{"start_seconds":1214,"text":"Yeah. Yeah. So um I think if you if you I'll I'll bring an analogy. Um, the way","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1214s"},{"start_seconds":1223,"text":"new technology platforms develop is first you get a capability. So Steve Jobs announces the iPhone. There's a","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1223s"},{"start_seconds":1230,"text":"piece of hardware. It has a multi-touch screen. It has a GPS. It is a camera. It is an accelerometer. Then you open it up to developers. So they announce the app store and they announce WWDC.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1230s"},{"start_seconds":1241,"text":"Oh, they have WWDC. And then developers and that can be inside of corporations or independent uh developers need to","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1241s"},{"start_seconds":1248,"text":"imagine applications and try their hand at doing it. And um and people need some","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1248s"},{"start_seconds":1254,"text":"examples to fuel their imaginations. So I think uh I think a lot of the capabilities are now there and I think","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1254s"},{"start_seconds":1263,"text":"that a lot of developers now have their hands on the capabilities and um are thinking and now I think they just need","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1263s"},{"start_seconds":1271,"text":"some inspiration and imagination. I I saw something last week where somebody had implemented open claw uh to trade","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1271s"},{"start_seconds":1279,"text":"poly markets five minute Bitcoin price prediction market and they had uh come out with a profitable P&L. Uh I think 200,000 people saw that tweet. I saw","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1279s"},{"start_seconds":1287,"text":"that tweet too. I'm now thinking about it. I'm now telling you all about it.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1287s"},{"start_seconds":1290,"text":"And there's probably uh 10 people now hacking in that direction, which is um using OpenClaw to act as a as a trading","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1290s"},{"start_seconds":1297,"text":"bot um or trading automation. So I I I think that there just need to start to be some examples and that that's why things like WWDC exist, right? Is to","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1297s"},{"start_seconds":1305,"text":"highlight examples that can fuel uh imagination and best practices. That sounds a little fuzzy and soft, but we we've we've talked in this in this","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1305s"},{"start_seconds":1314,"text":"conversation about the fact we're we're moving past the infrastructure stage towards the application stage and application requires uh a little bit of","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1314s"},{"start_seconds":1322,"text":"the subjective stuff which is what's what's a what's an idea that uh is worth uh is worth building. Um and uh so I I","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1322s"},{"start_seconds":1332,"text":"think uh I think that's what it'll take is some some uh some prominent uh productive use cases being tried um","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1332s"},{"start_seconds":1340,"text":"being effective and then being shared so that people um can be inspired by uh those examples. I don't know I'll um","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1340s"},{"start_seconds":1350,"text":"I'll I'll one way that I think about this kind of interesting. So there is a chance that the agentic payment commerce looks exactly like the current payment","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1350s"},{"start_seconds":1359,"text":"commerce. I don't think forever but for the foreseeable future. And I think the logic to it that I think is the strongest argument. So the steelman","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1359s"},{"start_seconds":1367,"text":"argument is okay we are building intelligence and it's general intelligence and it's essentially superhuman. You are telling me that a","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1367s"},{"start_seconds":1375,"text":"superhuman intelligence cannot use the current payment rails, the current credit cards, the current instance settlement to pay for things and to figure it out on their own. I mean, by","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1375s"},{"start_seconds":1383,"text":"definition, if they're smarter than me and I can do it, they can do it, too.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1383s"},{"start_seconds":1386,"text":"And so now you're actually discussing whether the rails are actually fit for purpose. And are you telling me that something that is smarter than me in all","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1386s"},{"start_seconds":1393,"text":"ways, shape, and forms, understands legal, understands engineering, understands the payment infrastructure of all the countries in the world is not going to come up with a way of like","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1393s"},{"start_seconds":1401,"text":"covering for it without actually building it? Maybe they themselves will actually build the SDKs on their own and they'll actually figure out how to actually communicate with one another.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1401s"},{"start_seconds":1409,"text":"So why would we build it? No, let them build it. They're the ones that are smarter than us. So actually this is a really good steal and argument that nobody has been able to decompose for me and say no, no, no, you're wrong because","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1409s"},{"start_seconds":1418,"text":"of A, B, and C. It's all kind of fuzzy of like you can't fight both arguments.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1418s"},{"start_seconds":1423,"text":"You can't tell me that AGI is coming and agents are going to be super smart and pay on their own and have all these capabilities and thus need payment systems and tell me that they're not","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1423s"},{"start_seconds":1430,"text":"going to be smart enough to figure out the current payment systems themselves.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1430s"},{"start_seconds":1433,"text":"So now we're in this conundrum of like this is this is what I'm calling kind of like a little bit of a you know you show me you tell me why I'm wrong. I think","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1433s"},{"start_seconds":1440,"text":"the burn of evidence is on the people that said that agent comedy is necessary cuz I feel like it is not.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1440s"},{"start_seconds":1446,"text":"Yeah. Amazing. So 30 seconds each. The bare case the bull case for why","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1446s"},{"start_seconds":1453,"text":"institutions will never reach or will reach scale with agentic commerce.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1453s"},{"start_seconds":1458,"text":"Will you say the last part of that question again? institutions will reach or will not reach scale with aentic commerce. So bare case for Diego, bullcase for you.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1458s"},{"start_seconds":1468,"text":"Hell yeah, I got the bullcase.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1468s"},{"start_seconds":1471,"text":"Uh I think that the I I I don't know how you all feel, but uh I've been in crypto for eight years,","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1471s"},{"start_seconds":1480,"text":"been in tech for longer than that. I feel like in some ways we make this all too complicated. uh and uh sort of","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1480s"},{"start_seconds":1488,"text":"imagine that we've never seen things like this before. We've never seen something like crypto before. We've never seen something like AI before. I","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1488s"},{"start_seconds":1494,"text":"don't know like you know in in the 80s uh there were just mainframes and then someone said you want a a mainframe in","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1494s"},{"start_seconds":1503,"text":"your home. It's your main frame. Pretty powerfully revolutionary. Then the internet you can connect to all of the information of the world. You can","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1503s"},{"start_seconds":1511,"text":"instantly communicate with anyone in the world. pretty so uh I I think uh I think","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1511s"},{"start_seconds":1518,"text":"absolutely institutions are going to the analogy I gave earlier is e-commerce some will ignore it they'll get","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1518s"},{"start_seconds":1526,"text":"deprecated some will step into it um and they'll be benefactors and then there will be a new guard um who are built from scratch on the new set of","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1526s"},{"start_seconds":1534,"text":"capabilities uh I think it's absolutely inevitable I would not bet against technology freight trains um I think","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1534s"},{"start_seconds":1541,"text":"there's not really a credible case um for why this uh new computing platform","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1541s"},{"start_seconds":1548,"text":"will somehow stumble and not get adopted uh unlike mobile and cloud and the internet and personal computers. Um I","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1548s"},{"start_seconds":1556,"text":"think everyone in this room is is doing the right thing which is now is a great time to be building executing paying close attention you know um and uh and I","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1556s"},{"start_seconds":1566,"text":"think there's opportunities are going to abound. I think it will take shapes that are surprising. It always does. Um but","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1566s"},{"start_seconds":1573,"text":"uh maybe the very last thing I'd say is institutions are absolutely paying attention. I mean the the way that you see the revenue numbers from the AI labs","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1573s"},{"start_seconds":1581,"text":"is because institutions are giving them revenue. Um so I've never seen something be uh focused on at the seuite level so","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1581s"},{"start_seconds":1590,"text":"rapidly as AI and budgets are being spent shortcircuiting the normal procurement process. I mean the whole the whole world is focused on it. So,","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1590s"},{"start_seconds":1599,"text":"uh, that doesn't mean that everyone's going to going to play through it intelligently. I think there's going to be all sorts of surprises in part, uh,","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1599s"},{"start_seconds":1606,"text":"not because it's a new technology. I mean, every other new technology was something we've never seen before, but actually because of the speed of the game. Can you dance at 4x accelerated","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1606s"},{"start_seconds":1616,"text":"rate uh, is I think the really new thing about AI. I'll just agree with one thing, which is I think the incumbents of yesterday year like the IBMs are very different than incumbents today. I can","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1616s"},{"start_seconds":1624,"text":"tell you right now that Visa Mastercard absolutely got the message when a shitty ass Marxist paper gets published on Twitter and they go down 5% and they","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1624s"},{"start_seconds":1632,"text":"lose tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of market cap. They are paying attention and these are extremely competent companies that can actually evolve very different than the incumbents. Stripe is an incumbent now.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1632s"},{"start_seconds":1642,"text":"They're very different in terms of execution than an IBM was as an incumbent. But I think the the bare case that I was presenting is the institutions will come. They are being","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1642s"},{"start_seconds":1650,"text":"forced to do it. they're extremely competent, but the value may not acrue to crypto. That is something that is very much out there as a jury is still out of whether our rails are going to be","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1650s"},{"start_seconds":1659,"text":"the rails that win. Uh, and if the value ends up acrewing for the underlying, I'm bullish that it it probably will and there's lots of reasons why, but it's","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1659s"},{"start_seconds":1667,"text":"not clear that um that that's 100% slam dunk. So our job as builders, as companies, is to make sure we're building for value, keeping it simple,","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1667s"},{"start_seconds":1676,"text":"and really not forgetting the things that have happened in the past that work really well to be able to continue that going, but continue to innovate. But fantastic to have both of you here","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1676s"},{"start_seconds":1685,"text":"today. Thank you for all the insights, all the contributions, and thank you for your time to listen. Thank you.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q&t=1685s"}],"youtube_url":"https://youtube.com/watch?v=b-XdOpERC1Q","url":"https://near-pedia.xyz/videos/b-XdOpERC1Q"}